this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Lefty Memes
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
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0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
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That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
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The only dangerous minority is the rich.
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We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
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Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
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Nooo don't break up the giant monolithic top down states into smaller federated communities, noooo!
But there'll still need to have common policies across all of those communities, otherwise you just end up right back at square one with nation states. The US and EU are literally just this, a bunch of states (US) or countries (EU) that agree to allow free travel/living/learning/business/etc between each other with a larger governing body that oversees all of it.
That's all good as long as this body doesn't have final control over the other territories.
The US/EU states/countries are also... states and countries, so that could change.
Originally, the federal government in the US was very, very limited in power and states had much higher degrees of autonomy than they do now. It resulted in tons of problems, even agreeing on a basic common currency was problematic.
Now, I think that it's swung too far in the other direction and that the federal government nowadays in the US has too much power. I think it's possible to meet in the middle, where you have a semi-central body where federated communities have a common ground to address and resolve grievances with an outside, neutral party mediating things.
Anyway, just my two cents.
The problem with the "middle ground" approach is that eventually it's bound to start acquiring more power.
This is just the nature of top down government structures and is pretty much inevitable.
True, that is a valid point. Maybe with direct democracy, hard safeguards, and very limited terms and funding, it could potentially be limited from expanding power. But, I'm not an expert, so I'll leave hypothetical future social governance planning to those who are more competent.
Understandable, I just enjoy thinking about these sort of things way too much, haha.
You think it's ok for a local federated state to allow slavery?
Because it took a centralized government to have final control over those states rights.
And the big bad wolf went to the straw man and huffed and puffed and blew the poor straw man away.